The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds by Enno Tamm Eric;

Author:Enno Tamm, Eric;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: D & M Publishers

THIRTEEN

LABRANG

Stoned

The bareheaded lamas, dressed in red, appeared

on all sides like an army of ants. Hooting,

jeers, stones.—C.G. MANNERHEIM, Across Asia

Click here for chapter thirteen resources, interactive maps, and comment board.

THE BLANK SPACES of the world’s map are becoming so narrow; there is so little left for the exploring enthusiast to mark with his pioneer footsteps.”1 And what little remained, explained the British journal Nature in 1904, was quickly being pencilled in. Only the most harrowing environments—the polar icecaps, the searing Sahara, the Tibetan Plateau—had yet to be fully surveyed.

A map of Tibet published by the Royal Geographical Society in 1906, in fact, bore the word “Unexplored” north of the Himalayas. “It was my ambition to obliterate that word from the map of Tibet,” wrote Sven Hedin.2 In early 1907, the Swedish explorer, having snuck into the country despite British opposition, sent a letter to the Times of London bragging about his exploits. “I have discovered many new lakes, rivers, mountain ranges, and goldfields, and the geographical results are extraordinarily rich,” he boasted.3 Disguised as a shepherd, he was still trekking through Tibet, while Mannerheim was in Lanzhou preparing for his own trek into areas traditionally inhabited by Tibetans.

In a modest way, Mannerheim was also filling in the blank spots of Inner Asia. He mapped 3,087 kilometres of his journey. While much of it was over well-trodden terrain—both Hedin and Aurel Stein had mapped the region between Kashgar and Khotan, for instance—other areas, such as the Tian Shan range, were not well surveyed. The scope of Mannerheim’s maps, however, was rather narrow, literally so: he rarely surveyed and sketched topography more than a kilometre or two from his route. He marked villages, campsites and farmers’ fields, drew contours of mountains, gorges, riverbeds and ravines, and wrote brief notes on travel times, road conditions and whatnot. His route maps look like long, wiggly ribbons surrounded by vast white space. Without surrounding

context—mountains, rivers, lakes and so on—they are difficult

to read.

He originally drew them on cardboard sheets and mapping notebooks at a scale of 1:84,000. To economize space, the maps were later reduced in size by more than 50 percent and then chopped up and confusingly rearranged like a jigsaw puzzle on fourteen map sheets for publication. Map XII covering the route south of Lanzhou, for instance, consists of eight disjointed sections. Even more confusing, Mannerheim’s peculiar spellings and the fact that many place names have changed over the years often left me stumped about his exact route. Mercifully, Harry Halén, the retired philologist at Helsinki University, had published an “analytical index” of places, persons and general terms mentioned in the Baron’s diary. He had also plotted Mannerheim’s trek on a modern map of China, which he allowed me to copy. But even Halén, a meticulous scholar, was at a loss to figure out the Baron’s route between Lanzhou and the Tibetan lamasery of Labrang, 160 kilometres to the southwest.

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